When I first read TRUST’s comment in a different thread, I had to question the logic.
After reading this classic column however, I’m starting to think Cecil should have left this question alone.
If there just isn’t a good answer, why repeat such simplistic, borderline asinine “explanations?”
Women using only one breast to breast feed? All women? All the time? And all of them using the left? (The swordplay thing sounds like bullshit too, but one thing at a time.)
By the time European men might be going about ready for swordplay in civilian life (say, starting in the mid-1500s, when swords were far less of a factor in military life than they once had been), they’d been buttoning down the front for centuries.
I’d always guessed it was related to the design of body armor. You often see medieval or Renaissance armor that reflects current civilian fashions; perhaps sometimes it worked the other way. Specifically, a brigandine that opens down the front is buckled with the left side overlapping the right side; most attacks would come from one’s left. (This would be the later 14th century, when you also start to see well-off people in outfits with lots of buttons.)
As for the ladies – a woman who’d be wearing an outfit with a lot of buttons would probably be wealthy enough to have a maid to help her. Or maybe it’s one of those aspects of fashion that don’t have a logical reason.
I thought much the same thing, SiXSwordS. A convention was established somehow and it stuck because it’s useful in sorting clothes.
Maybe just a way to tell men’s shirts from Women’s?
The reason for the different buttoning sides does have to do with swords and servants. Men’s clothes button with the left side over the right side to prevent the sword’s hilt from getting tangled up and/or caught on the outer flap of the shirt/coat. Since most people are right handed, that means the left flap was on the outside. The tradition of men’s shirts buttoning that way continues to today even though swords are only worn as part of a ceramonial dress uniform for the military.
Women’s clothing buttoned with the right flap on top because it is easier for a servant to dress the woman and for the husband to undress the woman after his battle. 
Sorry for the nitpick, but you do mean before his battle, right?
A theatre costume designer once told me that she remembers whose shirts button on which side by visualizing a man and a woman sitting in a (American style driver on the left) car. Stereotypically, the man would be driving an the woman would be in the passenger seat. And from this position, they can both see into each other’s shirts. :rolleyes:
In all seriousness, it does make sense to me that a man would want to keep his sword hilt from tangling in his shirt, although I’ve never heard that explanation before.
Really don’t think so. Again, by the time gentlemen started wearing swords with civilian clothes, they’d also been buttoning left-over-right for centuries. Also, if you draw a sword properly, it’s not going to make be making contact with the front of your coat anyway.
Here’s a question: If a woman’s shirt buttons opposite a man’s so that the maid can button it up for her most easily, then which way does the maid’s shirt button?
(Little maids have smaller maids inside their rooms to dress them…)
And those maids have smaller maids… Aw, heck, let’s suppress them.
Historically, ladies had buttons before their servants did. Buttons used to be luxury items.
And, of course, it was a poor household that could afford only one maid.